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Making Ivanka's profits great again

Donald Trump's daughter has a fashion and jewellery range. These days, who doesn't?

You probably do too. You may not have realised because you haven't received your year-end accounts yet. Check the spam box on your emails.

Ivanka has been caught up in the wave of popularity that has greeted her father since he took over as The Big White Chief.

People are so thrilled with the job he is doing that they have organised a boycott of anything Trump, so as to demonstrate their support.

It is called the GrabYourWallet campaign and it is coming to a Trump product retailer near you soon.

To mitigate the losses from having been dropped by a slew of stores, Trump got right-hand woman Kellyanne Conway to try to persuade the country to buy Ivanka's clothes and accessories from the home turf of the Fox News channel.

He did this to underline the fact that Trump has really distanced himself from all his family businesses.

It's not like he's doing this to get richer or anything.

Conway told Fox News viewers to “go buy Ivanka’s stuff,”

She said, "This is just a wonderful line." "I'm going to give a free commercial here. Go buy it today, everybody. You can find it online."

That leaves little room for doubt as to her loyalty to the brand, or that it was an advert delivered to the nation from the Whitehouse to buy products that would directly benefit the family of the President.

While Trump has repeatedly stated that he is above the law on conflict of interest, the same can not be said of employees of the state.

Specifically, Conway violated a key ethics rule barring federal employees from using their public office to endorse products.

You are not supposed to use the presidency to enrich your family but it has been happening ever since he took office.

If you look on the Whitehouse website, you see Trump boasting about his success and advertising his own book The Art of the Deal.

When Ivanka was interviewed by the press after Trump's victory, she alerted journalists to the fact that she was wearing Ivanka brand jewellery, which is also not doing too well these days because of that consumer boycott.

It seems like the sort of thing that right wingers would do - to go after any target they can to progress their agenda.

Perhaps the left have finally learned their lesson from the right, which is, in a nutshell: stop being so nice.

The right have never been hampered by being nice. They get what they want by stirring fear, refusing to talk, shouting down the opposition, and basically doing anything necessary to get their way.

Just look at the Tea Party and the Christian fundamentalists who boycott, protest and flood their government representatives with phone calls and letters to get them to bow to their collective will.

Now those in the centre and on the left are starting to fight back using the same tactics.

It's about time.

It has only been a couple of weeks but so far the Trump administration and the newly emboldened Republican Party is getting rid of the rules about the coal industry polluting the environment - specifically to allow coal mines to dump toxic heavy metal waste into rivers, the ban on which the coal companies say is restricting their ability to make money.

They have cancelled the rules on capturing methane leaks from oil and gas drilling. Unfortunately for those of us who do not think that climate change is a Chinese conspiracy, Methane produces 21 times as much warming in the atmosphere as Carbon Dioxide.

The administration has also dropped the rule about disclosing bribes that oil and gas companies give to foreign governments. This was intended to cut down on corruption. Rex Tillerson, the new Secretary of State lobbied against that rule in 2010 when he was running the oil giant Exxon Mobil, arguing that preventing corruption would put his company at a disadvantage. He lost under Obama. He has won now under Trump.

They are looking to change the rule about banks and financial companies having to work in the interests of their clients, which was put there to stop people from being ripped off. Banks and financial advisors could go back to selling you something they know is rotten and then making a side bet that it will fail.

And they've made it legal to sell guns to the mentally unstable without any background checks.

All of that was done while our attention was taken by the constant inane twitterings from the Whitehouse and the fight about the immigration ban.

With this administration you really do have to have eyes in the back of your head.

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